March 3, 2013 at
11:55 AM

As we head into the 2013 season, we'd like to announce some upgrades we put in place over the off-season.

First, as many of you probably already noticed, we upgraded forum hosts back in September, moving from Yuku to ProBoards. (If you had a Yuku account and you're just coming back to the forum for the first time, please note that your Yuku account will not work on the ProBoards system). There is also a ProBoards app available on both the iPhone and Android platforms to vastly improve the forum experience on mobile devices.

More recently (read: yesterday), we upgraded to a new version of ProBoards -- from "v4" to "v5." The new version includes several additional enhancements, including a visual posting editor, a significantly-improved search function, an integrated forum notification system, the return of RSS feeds, the ability to change your display name, stronger privacy controls, improved moderation tools, a global ProBoards log-in feature, and an avatar creator.

Second, we upgraded our Prospect Scouting Scale to a simpler and easier-to-remember 2-8 scale, which is more in line with industry standards. You'll find the basics of the new Prospect ScoutingScale on the bottom left sidebar of the rankings pages, with a detailed explanation on the About page.

Third, we revamped the top menu so as to better highlight all of the content available on SoxProspects.com. The new menu should also work much better on mobile devices, as we've eliminated pull-down menus. The top menu is now consistent across all parts of the site, including SoxProspects.com, the SoxProspects Forum, SoxProspects News, and the redesigned SoxProspects Wiki. One new menu item of note is the Features tab, which will bring you to SoxProspects News, but only list the most recent feature columns, parsing out everyday news items.

Last but not least, we made some additions to and promotions within our Staff. Matt Huegel and Jon Meoli have been added to the ownership team, with Huegel being promoted to Managing Editor. We added three new up-and-coming writers in Tim Healey, Kevin Pereira, and Luke Lavoie. On the digital content side, Steve Henley was promoted to Senior Web Content Manager, and we added Matt Picard, Rebecca Fishbein, and Keith Wade as Web Content Managers. We also added Norm Cimon as a new Forum Moderator. We're also in the process of potentially adding a handful of scouting correspondents to our staff in order to have more eyes and ears in the Red Sox affiliate cities.

Mike Andrews is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of SoxProspects.com. Follow him on Twitter @MikeAndrewsSP